"The Ubuntu Technical Board has made two technical decisions of which we would like to inform the Ubuntu community. Both of these decisions concern the upcoming 7.04 release of Ubuntu, scheduled for mid-April." Ubuntu 7.04 will not activate binary video drivers by default, essentially meaning nothing will change from the previous releases. The second change is a major blow to the PowerPC architecture and thus owners of Apple PPC hardware: "The PowerPC edition of Ubuntu will be reclassified as unofficial. The PowerPC software itself and supporting infrastructure will continue to be available, and supported by a community team." Translation: Ubuntu PPC can shake hands with the dodo.

At the moment, we really haven't made a decision on the future of long-term supported PPC releases. It's likely to be heavily influenced by demand, and if the POWER-based hardware is popular, then there's likely to be demand. The Niagara release of 6.06 was based off the community SPARC release from earlier versions, and I think we were still the first distribution to be offering a commercially supported release on that hardware[1]. So, if someone wants it, we can provide full support in a very short space of time. Right now, as far as I know, nobody[2] is really telling us that they want it.

[1] To an extent because the release cycle just worked out that way, but still.

[2] Well, I'm not privy to Canonical's commercial interactions. It's quite possible that there are negotiations surrounding this sort of thing, and I'm just not being told about them. But there's no sense in refusing to supply what people want.